[In the following review, Hoff investigates the limitations and likely abuses of Pavlovian theory.]

The esteem in which the world of science, and* physiologists in particular, hold Ivan P. Pavlov is equalled only by that exhibited by the public at large. Indeed, he is one of the few physiologists of any age or country whose views have captured the public fancy and entered its everyday thinking; probably Freud alone in this century has had as great an influence. These considerations alone should insure for this volume of the selected works of Pavlov [Experimental Psychology and Other Essays] a large, interested, and favorably oriented audience. Beyond this, however, the western world has become aware that in the Soviet Union the works of Pavlov are accorded an even greater status as the foundation of Soviet psychiatry, as a fundamental guide to education, and presumably as the operating principle of "brainwashing." For these reasons this volume must, and very likely will, be read very carefully indeed. The reader will be disappointed and fail to find the clue to such weighty problems in these academic exercises so redolent of the nineteenth century, when, as Sherrington wrote, scientists knew far less and spread themselves out more than today.

The publisher tells us little about the auspices of the present volume, but the subtler details of expression indicate that the translator was probably Russian, while the designation of two paintings of Pavlov, one showing a visit by Maxim Gorky as "rare pictorial material," and the repeated references to Pavlov as "Academician Pavlov" or as "the eminent physiologist Pavlov" suggests that primarily the volume may well have been intended for a public less acquainted with Pavlov than is to be found in the English-speaking world.

The reader will expect to find a reasoned, and reasonable, account of the connection between the work of Pavlov and modern Russian psychiatry in the Introduction, which purports to deal with the significance of Pavlov's work; in this he will also be disappointed. Rather, the chapter begins by forwarding the argument that the main channels of Russian physiological thought, and in particular those determining the contributions of Sechenov and Pavlov, were indigenous. It then presents the developments that led to the concept of the conditioned reflex, and concludes with the statement that the last fifteen years of Pavlov's life (i.e., during the Soviet regime) were the best and most fruitful years of his school. During this period, and thereafter, "the theory of conditioned reflexes has been theoretically advanced by Pavlov's followers; it has found wide practical application in analyzing the various disturbances of the nervous activity and in elaborating ways and means of restoring it to normal."

Whatever the original audience for which this volume may have been intended, it is amply clear from the particular selections included, from the Introduction and from other recent publications, that this presentation is official, and represents present-day physiological orthodoxy in Russia. Nor are clues lacking to indicate why the Soviet hierarchy has been so attracted to Pavlov's doctrines: (a) Pavlov's injunction that physiologists must "control" physiological phenomena, (b) that the conditioning stimuli for the conditioned reflex are "indifferent," and (c) that conditioned reflexes may be transferred genetically to subsequent generations, where they become part of the unconditioned reflex apparatus. Here are the germs of thought control or manipulation of the human mind, of the cynical view that human beings can be conditioned to absolutely anything, and the wishful thinking that once a population is conditioned in this way, future generations will be born with ready-made replicas of their parents' painfully acquired conditioning. We learn from Jones's biography of Freud that he too believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics; indeed, this belief was common throughout the nineteenth century. Few scientists clung to the belief as long as did Pavlov, and no one else found a powerful state to sponsor it as an article of faith.

The earlier papers of the volume do much to indicate the physiological climate from which Pavlov's contributions sprang, and which formed the matrix of his development of the conditioned reflex. Fundamentally, Pavlov thought in terms of the primitive reflexology of the pre-Sherringtonian period, when the explanation for much of the normal and even pathological behavior was being sought in the reflex. In Pavlov's paper concerning "Trophic Innervation" published in 1922, we see the persistence of this all-pervading, non-specific "nervism" in a discussion that has little to add to Whytt's essay on the sympathy between parts or to the Brounonian doctrine of hyperirritability and hypoirritability as the cause of disease—indeed throughout the volume Pavlov makes it clear that to him the major etiological factor in many if not most diseases of the nervous system is the "weakness" of one system or another, and, like Brown, Pavlov prescribes appropriate stimulants or sedatives.

But the main concern of this book—and the main concern of the reader—centers around what the Russians term "the higher nervous activity" and the explicit claim by his followers that Pavlov's work constitutes an essential break-through on the age-old problem of the relation between psychical and physical phenomena. Pavlov himself may not have been quite so certain of this, for as late as 1932 he declared at the International Congress of Physiology at Rome, "I am convinced that an important stage in the development of human thought is approaching—a stage when the physiological and the psychological, the objective and the subjective, will really merge, when the painful contradiction between our mind and our body and their contraposition will either actually be solved or disappear in a natural way." With this hope, no one could take exception; that it has already been accomplished, either by Pavlov or by anyone else, is quite another matter and the very bone of the contention.

With Pavlov's intention, no physiologist can quarrel; to express the action of the whole in the terms of its parts, to explain organismal behavior by unit behavior is indeed the function of the physiologist. It is then his task to explain those phenomena that center in the brain in the vocabulary of the nerve impulse, the reflex, the synapse and whatever concepts describe the behavior of the single units of nervous activity and their mutual interrelations. This approach presupposes, of course, a complete understanding of neurophysiology on the one hand, and of psychology and psychiatry on the other. It will be abundantly clear to the unprejudiced reader that neither requirement has been fulfilled, and that terms like excitation, inhibition, and facilitation, fail more and more to explain the phenomenon of the simplest reflex, much less the behavior of the whole organism, for one very good reason at least that place and time must be integrated with process before a really satisfactory account of the function of the nervous system can be given.

Here is probably the reason that Freud and Sherrington are listed as the greatest enemies of Pavlov's teachings, and why such a sharply defined dichotomy is established between the "idealistic" Western neurophysiology and psychiatry and the "materialism" attributed to Pavlov. To Sherrington, who knew not a little about the workings of the cortex, the reflex was simply an inadequate basis for a full explanation of the operation of the brain; to Freud, the mind was too complicated to be anchored to the reflex. The least pleasant parts of this book are, indeed, pages devoted to intemperate attacks on Sherrington, attributed to Pavlov. Some light might be thrown on their authenticity by quoting from an address by an "official" Soviet Pavlovian disciple, A. G. Ivanov-Smolensky, referred to below: "His attempt to prove the incorrectness of my views regarding the relation between the subjective and the objective by quoting The Pavlov Wednesdays is unconvincing. The notes of one of Pavlov's disciples and the stenographic reports which make up the three volumes of The Pavlov Wednesdays were never read, checked, or initialled by Pavlov. They contain many errors, inaccuracies, and distortions of what Pavlov actually said, and this is true of the passage which Professor Gushuni quoted."

This volume, a monograph by Ivanov-Smolensky entitled "Essays on the Patho-Physiology of the Higher Nervous Activity," published in 1954 by the Foreign Languages Publishing House of Moscow, an earlier report of a "Scientific Session on the Physiological Teaching of Academician I. P. Pavlov" of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., published by the same bureau, and Words' account of "Soviet Psychiatry" (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1950), indicate unmistakably that we are witnessing the creation of a new dogma in neurophysiology, and the canonization of its ostensible creator, Pavlov. We will probably have to go back to Galen to find a phenomenon quite to equal it. In both cases we see that it entails the rejection of the main attributes of the protagonists; the unfettered utilization of the experimental method, and the broadest possible integration of the work and ideas of other people. It is well known how Galen's views were sharpened, crystallized and solidified by later commentators; his actual views on the circulation were by no means as rigid as the conventional "Galenical" dogma, of Arabic origin. So, too, there is an essential difference between Pavlov's statement at Rome in 1932, previously quoted, and the claim that the stage where "physiological and the psychical, the objective and the subjective will really merge" is now here, or past, and that Pavlov's work provides the detailed blueprint of the unification.

Looking back over the centuries to the long period when a Galenical dogma was slavishly adhered to, and then to the revolution against it and the renaissance of science in Europe, one is struck by the thought that the renaissance was in reality a return to the essence of real Galenism—the experimental method in medicine—and that Galen's real contributions have since been lost sight of and largely neglected. We can thus predict that the present trend in Russia may well stultify the very qualities that made Pavlov one of the great physiologists, and lessen the recognition that is his due.